Revenge of the Savage Planet opens with an abandonment. Your employer leaves you on a remote planet with no gear and no way home. Raccoon Logic builds its sequel around that premise: repair the ship, cross the planets, get back to Earth, settle the score.
The studio’s follow-up to Journey to the Savage Planet launched May 8, 2025 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows and Xbox Series X/S. It swaps the first game’s first-person view for third person, adds base building and co-op, and keeps the satire upbeat. It works, mostly.
Trailer, via Raccoon Logic | Breakaway Hockey League.
Stellaris Prime and the Base You Build
You start on Stellaris Prime, the game’s starting planet, and it doubles as your home base. Facilities and rooms you add there unlock new abilities and equipment. That loop gives the exploration a spine. Every scan and every captured creature feeds something back into the base.
The game has four main planets — Stellaris Prime, Xephyr, Quasadron IX and Zenithian Rift — each with its own landscape. A fifth planet opens after you finish the story. Scanning flora and fauna is how you learn a planet’s secrets and unlock upgrades, which turns curiosity into mechanical progress.
Grapple Points, Rails and the Goo Ingestor
The traversal kit is where Revenge of the Savage Planet earns its keep. The Proton Whip Tether lets you use grapple points to zip across gaps. The Hawx Rail Grinder lets you grind on rails. The Goo Ingestor sprays water, lava and acid across the environment.
Those gadgets do more than move you. They gate the map. Certain areas stay closed until you have the right traversal upgrade, a structure lifted straight from Metroidvania design. The order you unlock things in matters, and the game is honest about it.
Here is how the progression breaks down:
- Land on Stellaris Prime and build out the home base.
- Scan flora and fauna to unlock upgrades.
- Capture and research hostile creatures for new gear and outfit color palettes.
- Open the remaining planets as traversal tools come online.
- Finish the story to unlock the fifth planet.
Hostile Creatures and the Research Loop
Enemies are aggressive and everywhere. Some can be stunned and captured, which starts a research line that pays out new upgrades and new color palettes for your outfit. That is a small thing, but it makes the collecting feel less like busywork.
The co-op is the other draw. The game supports local split-screen and online two-player cooperative play. That covers the full spread of modes: single player, multiplayer, co-operative and split screen. A satirical sci-fi shooter that you can hand to a friend on the couch is a rarer thing than it should be.
Where the Third-Person Shift Pays Off
Switching to third person is the sequel’s biggest structural change, and it is the right one. You can see your character, and the outfit palettes you unlock through research actually mean something. The move also makes the grapple-and-grind traversal read better on screen.
The tone stays light. This is an action adventure that wants to be funny about corporate abandonment, and the premise — a worker discarded by an employer, then out for revenge — gives the satire somewhere to land.
Jump, shoot and collect your way across vibrant alien worlds, uncovering new gear and upgrades, while discovering various hidden secrets.
The game is a shooter and an adventure, with action and science fiction themes, played from a third-person perspective. That combination is not novel. The execution is what carries it.
What Holds It Back
The Metroidvania gating is a double edge. Locked areas give the planets a reason to be revisited, but they also mean the early hours can stall while you hunt for the one upgrade that opens a path. The research loop, meanwhile, leans on the same scan-and-collect motion across all four planets. By the later worlds, the routine is familiar in a way that is not always flattering.
None of that sinks the game. It just keeps Revenge of the Savage Planet short of the top tier. The gadgets are genuinely good, the base building gives the whole thing a home, and the co-op is a real feature rather than a checkbox.
The sequel also knows what it is. It is a bright, mean little satire about work, wrapped in a shooter that lets you spray acid on the scenery. That is a specific pleasure, and Raccoon Logic delivers it without much padding.
Revenge of the Savage Planet is the rare sequel that changes perspective and gets better for it. The third-person shift, the traversal kit and the split-screen co-op are the reasons to play. The gated map and the repetitive research loop are the reasons it lands just under the best in its class. It is a confident, funny, well-built action adventure, and it is worth your time.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
